Matt Johnson

Well, there is one effective solution, tested first in Finland and now working in cities like Houston: Housing First. It’s not perfect, but it’s far better than incarceration or demands that people on the streets get clean or solve their mental health issues before they are helped with housing.

Could you at least walk through the hole in the center?

The Dems often unwittingly fall into the trap a second time with ham-handed responses. The response then gets amplified all over again, providing endless rounds of content for Fox.

Quickly leading to “bi-yearly” redistricting.

Actually, the rises in crime perception coincide with Republican admins.

So US perception of crime dropped through the 1990s and then began to spike again in 2000 (despite crime continuing to fall.)

What happened in 2000? 9/11? Rise of Fox News? This was ten years prior to social media.

“Grey vinyl wood look.”

By default, anyone that Machiavellian is disqualified by Dems and the left as morally compromised. Thus our dilemma. We want a fighter, but one who only engages in proper fisticuffs according to dignified norms—against an opponent with three knives, a sledgehammer, a blowtorch, and no boundaries.

Its only value is power. Otherwise, it is nihilistic. It actually doesn’t care about policy at all, except insofar as policy can accrue concentrated power.

Great piece. Many people speculated that Trump first decided to run for president when he himself was humiliated by Obama at the 2011 Washington Correspondents' Dinner. I assume Trump might have run regardless, but I often wonder whether that was the galvanizing moment.

Most of Lizzie Fletcher's (D) wealthy/urban/liberal District 7 would, I think, become District 8, merged with MAGA-conservative Montgomery, 1.5 hours away. (Fletcher's district 7 ends up jumping to the rural Louisiana border & Beaumont. They never forgave her for ousting John Culberson in 2019.)

Behind Trump’s 2024 Victory, a More Racially and Ethnically Diverse Voter Coalition Pew Research Center’s in-depth study of its survey respondents who voted in the 2024 election examines turnout, voting patterns and demographics.

Especially important when noting that 15% of Biden 2020 voters stayed home in 2024. The election wasn’t won because voters shifted rightward—it was because they shifted couchward. www.pewresearch.org/politics/202...

Yup. I know the park. My point was the chilling effect these kinds of actions will have on public spaces—especially as funding ramps up to "small nation" levels.

So in addition to everything else, ICE is attempting to destroy the last vestiges of civic and public space in major cities by running their hypermilitarized operations in parks where kids play.

It would be a real Herzog/Kinski situation.

Had this same thought! Also Fitzcarraldo/Burden of Dreams.

But which comes first? Does the intransigence lead them to the JD, or does the JD make them intransigent?

Yeah, I don’t know if this was a red/blue issue as much as it was just a failure of leadership going into the holiday. I don’t even know if they were “skeptical” of the warnings—likely they ignored or didn’t act on the warnings.

Honestly, I don't think this situation has anything to do with cuts. It's just a failure of leadership and of shifting blame, as well as the absence of a clear warning system (sirens, alerts, etc.) The models were accurate and did what they had to do.

Kristi Noem Secretly Took a Cut of Political Donations A dark money group paid $80,000 to Noem’s personal company when she was governor of South Dakota. She did not include this income on her federal disclosure forms, a likely violation of ethics…

NEW: Kristi Noem, while governor of South Dakota, supplemented her roughly $130,000 salary by secretly accepting $80,000 donated to a political nonprofit she was affiliated with, records show.

She never disclosed this income on federal ethics forms.

The energy provisions in the Republicans' One Big Horrible Bill are truly so bad! Who wants this? The country's automakers don't want it. Electric utilities don't want it. Data center developers don't want it. Manufacturers in energy intensive industries don't want it. 🔌💡

De Blasio’s comments really sum up the entire US at the moment, not just New York.

I think the problem is in part with the word "attempt."

In all the videos I'm seeing, several masked men strongarm the person into handcuffs. There is no "attempt"— it is simply done, no discussion, no rights, they're in handcuffs, detained with no recourse. Detain first, questions later.

"Realistic" so often means "status quo". Minor tweaks to mostly ineffective existing policies.

But the KIND of supply matters immensely. One of the infuriating things about Dems is that they'll pump a bunch of money into conventional media and ads without realizing that guerrilla media now has a bigger impact.

"The scientific research base of the United States of America *is* the research university. We made that decision 80 years ago. We don't have a Plan B." — Condoleezza Rice

With the erosion of “elite consensus” I’m not sure how we gain that back. Consensus now is driven by the swarm, easily guided by amoral actors, and it’s strangely valueless—or its values are highly situational and fragile.

I think this is *mostly* true. However, we arrive at these media with either weak or solid epistemic frameworks. The media system exploits people with weak epistemic frameworks—their beliefs can be shaped by a steady drip of infotainment and social media sludge.

MERZ: Tomorrow is the D Day anniversary, when the Americans ended a war in Europe

TRUMP: That was not a pleasant day for you? This is not a great day

MERZ: This was the liberation of my country from Nazi dictatorship

This paragraph should be posted on the door of every Democratic legislator in the US. talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/democ...